About

Back in mid – 2004 the following generative question emerged to Andre and Gwen van der Merwe, founders of Eiffel-Corp, one of Africa’s leading educational technology suppliers:

‘What can we do to help educational technologists and faculty derive the maximum teaching and learning benefit from their technology investments?’

Six years of helping large and small Institutions implement technology projects had left Andre and Gwen with a nagging feeling that there was so much more creativity to come from technology use in education. This feeling and that question proved inescapable and led to a (currently) 5 year, multi million Rand research project called Cultivate.

Through that time we’ve researched heavily across disciplines such as learning theory, instructional design, organizational change theory, systems thinking, visual communication theory, integral philosophy, industrial prototyping and technological innovation marketing. For a start. This has enabled us to form an interdisciplinary model in order to give Institutions as holistic an approach as is possible to their teaching and learning development. And it enables us to tie together our resources, processes, approach and underlying philosophy coherently. The other strand of the Cultivate project has been our work with educational institutions. Everything has been developed with the passionate intelligence and commitment of our colleagues across South Africa and the world. We’ve learned enormous amounts from road testing our ideas and resources with them.

Cultivate continues to develop in terms of the breadth of technologies our resources cover and the processes, training and support we can offer to help those who are tasked with integrating innovation into educational institutions.